Ideas

Modular arithmetic has been a major concern of mathematicians for at least 250 years, and is still a very active topic of current research. In this article, I will explain what modular arithmetic is, illustrate why it is of importance for...

How do we navigate the vast amount of data at our disposal? How do we choose a movie to watch, out of the 75,000 movies available on Netflix? Or a new book to read, among the 800,000 listed on Amazon? Or which news articles to read, out of the...

There are two kinds of creation myths: those where life arises out of the mud, and those where life falls from the sky. In this creation myth, computers arose from the mud, and code fell from the sky. 

The Institute for Advanced Study’s Park City Mathematics Institute (PCMI) has run a summer program for secondary school mathematics teacher-leaders since 1994. About fifty nationally selected secondary mathematics teachers participate in the three...

Fields Medalist Maryam Mirzakhani, former Member in the School of Mathematics, gives the third of three 2012 Marston Morse Lectures on Dynamics on the Moduli Spaces of Curves.

Fields Medalist Maryam Mirzakhani, former Member in the School of Mathematics, gives the second of three 2012 Marston Morse Lectures on Dynamics on the Moduli Spaces of Curves.

Fields Medalist Maryam Mirzakhani, former Member in the School of Mathematics, gives the first of three 2012 Marston Morse Lectures on Dynamics on the Moduli Spaces of Curves.

One of the oldest subjects in mathematics is the study of Diophantine equations, i.e., the study of whole number (or fractional) solutions to polynomial equations. It remains one of the most active areas of mathematics today. Perhaps the most basic...

In 1900, David Hilbert published a list of twenty-three open questions in mathematics, ten of which he presented at the International Congress of Mathematics in Paris that year. Hilbert had a good nose for asking mathematical questions as the ones...

The above photograph (ca. 1958) of Marston Morse (1892–1977), Professor in the School of Mathematics, and his wife Louise is a rare image from one of two albums compiled by Louise Morse over seven decades. It is unusual in that it includes Louise...